STUDY: JAMAICANS LESS ANTI-GAY THAN BRITISH AFTER ASSOCIATING WITH GAY MEN

This is Dr. Keon West. He is a social psychologist from the University of Leeds in the U.K. He is also a gay rights activist while being the son of the popular anti-gay activist, Dr. Wayne West, in Jamaica. He has produced a study done on anti-gay attitudes in Jamaica called “Culture and Contact in the Promotionand Reduction of Anti-Gay Prejudice: Evidence from Jamaica and Britain” which sought to find out how to reduce sexual prejudice (anti-gay attitudes)in Jamaicans.

Keon West, the son of major anti-gay activist Wayne West, has contributed to our understanding of homophobia in Jamaica

In his study, Dr. West sought to find out whether inter-group contact between gays and anti-gay people in Britain and Jamaica would reduce prejudice and improve relations. It turned out that Jamaican participants reported more anti-gay attitudes towards gay men but when Jamaicans came into contact with gay men they reported less sexual prejudice(anti-gay attitudes) than British participants.

Some other things mentioned in the study:

– Three hundred ﬁfteen heterosexual university students, 107 Jamaicans, 43males and 64 females and 208 Britons,70 males and 138 females , took part in the study.

– Jamaican participants reported more inter-group anxiety toward gay men than did British participants.

-Jamaican participants also reported more negative attitudes toward gay men than did British participants.

– Although Jamaican participants reported more prejudice against gay men than did British participants, the results were encouraging in that Jamaicans’attitudes toward gay men appeared to be malleable. Contact was more strongly associated with positive attitudes in the Jamaican sample than in the British sample. Thus, although Jamaican sexual prejudice may be stronger than corresponding British sexual prejudice, it appears that change is possible.

-Inter-group contact is demonstrably effective at reducing intergroup bias and improving intergroup relations, and has been shown to have a negative relationship with anti-gay prejudice in Jamaica.

-In part because research on anti-gay prejudice in Jamaicais so scarce, contact is currently the only prejudice-reducing mechanism with any empirical support.